September 25, 2012 6:49pm EDTSeptember 25, 2012 6:29pm EDTDale Earnhardt Jr. is disappointed in his performance during the first two races of the Chase. But he's also mindful that his team can catch lightning in the final eight races and get right back into the title hunt.

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“It ain’t coming to us,” Earnhardt said Tuesday after speaking to fans at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. “I’m not going to paint it up like it’s all roses when it’s not. I know what the situation is and I understand the reality of our position.

“We’re 26 points behind. There’s lots of racing left. … It ain’t exactly the start we wanted but we can’t sit here and just beat ourselves to death about it because it could have been worse. We could have been much further back in the finishing order this weekend.”

Earnhardt believes the key to any sort of comeback rests in how the team performs Fridays and Saturdays—that how the team practices will determine whether it gets results on race day.

The bad day at New Hampshire last Sunday was the result of not using the practice sessions well.

“We struggled this weekend on Friday and on Saturday maximizing our opportunities in practice to learn about our car and improve our car,” Earnhardt said on a teleconference earlier Tuesday afternoon.

“Our car wasn't perfect. But there were a lot of teams at that race this past weekend that didn't have perfect cars that worked on them in practice and did more than we did.”

Earnhardt was disappointed in the entire weekend from start to finish. They started with the setup from July and added a bunch of ideas that got them behind from the very first lap.

“The car was very bad and we were really frustrated,” Earnhardt said. “We actually stayed in race trim way too long (in practice) and by the time we got into qualifying trim, we had 10 minutes left on the racetrack. … That whole practice was a cluster and was not a good way to begin the weekend.”

The weekend continued—“it was inevitable to me that the car was not going to be what we needed, and it wasn’t”—and ended with Earnhardt feeling pretty sour and him airing a little bit of frustration afterward on how bad they were. He also didn’t do much to pump up his team afterward.

“I was pretty disappointed in myself Sunday with my body language after the race,” he said. “When you get out of the car, you try to give your team the credit for working.

“They’re there working whether you finish first or last. They work as hard as they can. … For some of the reason after the race, I get out of the car and don’t say anything. I know that is not the best reaction out of the choices I have. It’s real hard for me to get over it.”

While frustrated, Earnhardt doesn’t feel the team should panic or begin taking big risks on the racetrack. The team also needs to be smart in races, Earnhardt said.

“We run as hard as we can run,” Earnhardt said. “It ain't like I can take any more risks on the racetrack than I can take other than see if the car can go through the corner wide open—which I know it won't, it would be a foolish risk.

“We can't come down pit road and not take tires because that puts us out first on the racetrack. We'd be in 10th or 20th place in four or five laps with everybody behind us on new tires. Those are kind of foolish (things). I don't really know what else we can do.”

Earnhardt does not view the somewhat slow start to the Chase as a continuation of an inconsistent August. He believes those inconsistency issues were more caused by trying new things to get ready for the Chase.

He views New Hampshire more as the example of what the team has to avoid heading into this weekend at Dover, a track where he has an average finish of 17th and just eight top-10s in 25 career starts.

If the car is bad in practice at Dover, Earnhardt said that the Hendrick Motorsports team needs to attack those problems more aggressively than it has in practice in recent weeks.

“Sometimes you say, … ‘Maybe it’s not as bad as I think it is’ or ‘that is something we’ll have to deal with and in the race when we’re all out there, we’ll be fine,’” Earnhardt said. “That’s a mistake to get that complacent about it and think that it’s something that is just going to go away or you’re just going to overcome it or work through it.

“If the car is doing something on the racetrack in practice, that’s going to be there when the race starts. It’s going to be a problem.”

So how does he handle it? Earnhardt isn’t sure. He has so much respect for crew chief Steve Letarte that he doesn’t want to show disrespect.

“There’s times in the car where I want to step up and go, ‘Hey, man, this is really a problem, this is something really we’ve got to fix,’” Earnhardt said. “Steve’s going to take that as ‘Of course I’m trying to fix it, man, we’re talking about that right now, me and the engineers, give us a moment to figure out what we need to do.’

“I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get pushy and shoving. But there is a way to relay my sincereness about a particular problem with the car.”

There are no communication problems as far as where they’re at in the championship hunt.

“It’s going to be hard,” Earnhardt said. “Jimmie’s team ain’t no slouch. They are going to put up a hell of a fight and there may be someone else hiding in the weeds that might come out and put on a tear these next eight races. That could be us. Easily.”